While 90% of Australia’s population lives in cities, it is in the continent’s vast landscapes where you can glimpse the country’s soul.

Photographs by Paul McMahon

While 90% of Australia&#8217;s population lives in cities, it is in the continent&#8217;s vast landscapes where you can glimpse the country&#8217;s soul.

Editor's note: In lieu of an artist's statement, we have collected a few quotes about the Australian landscape which seem appropriate given Paul McMahon's subject and his approach to it.

A queer country, so old that as you walk on and on, there’s a feeling comes over you that you are gone back to Genesis.

—Anonymous Bushman

I love a sunburnt country, a land of sweeping plains,Of rugged mountain ranges, of droughts and flooding rains.I love her far horizons, I love her jewel-sea,Her beauty and her terror —the wide brown land for me!

—Dorothea Mackellar, My Country

How can mere red dirt and stones and scrubby trees and shrubs and rises and falls in the land and haze and a vast blue sky be so potent? Such was its power, even in the intense heat, even at night — sometimes, especially at night — the landscape seized you.